Nashua Democrat Lawmaker: 'Hard Labor' Proposal Risks North Korea-Style Prison Camps

By Damien Fisher, NH Journal

During a raucous day in the New Hampshire state house on Wednesday, a Democratic candidate for Congress shouted that her Republican colleagues were “going to hell,” and another House member compared GOP legislation to Communist labor camps.

As Republicans expressed their opposition to legislation that would have extended free taxpayer-funded school lunches to all students regardless of income, Rep. Paige Beachemin (D-Nashua) shouted, “You’re going to hell!” The House took a short recess to allow temperatures to cool.

It didn’t quite work.

During the House vote on a GOP proposal to sentence convicted murderers and child rapists to hard labor, Rep. Linda Harriott-Gathright (D-Nashua) said it was a recipe for North Korean-style labor camps.

Harriott-Gathright spoke out against the hard labor amendment to SB 15 during the House session on Wednesday, saying the proposal is a potential financial black hole for New Hampshire taxpayers, and a constitutional non-starter.

“Hard labor is not free. It requires increased staffing, overtime transportation, security equipment, medical monitoring, training, and insurance. Every injury, every lawsuit, every staffing shortage costs the state real money,” Harriott-Gathright said. “Creating labor camps like those in North Korea, China, and Russia also creates serious constitutional concerns.”

But Rep. Terry Roy (R-Deerfield) pushed back on the idea that the amendment creates labor camps.

“If anyone can find the words labor camp anywhere in that bill, I will give you my entire salary,” Roy said.

Convicted murderers and child rapists can now serve their time enjoying prison, according to Roy. In Roy’s telling, inmates serving life without parole get free healthcare, gym time, access to higher education, and iPads while their victims are sentenced to remembering their crimes. The hard labor amendment seeks to give inmates something more to do than work out and get college degrees, Roy said.

“Or we can add the opportunity for a jury to decide that the crime was so heinous, a super majority of the jury, that that person needs to remember that crime for the rest of their life, or as long as they’re in there. In five days a week, eight hours a day, they will do hard labor,” Roy said.

The House sided with Roy, largely along party lines, voting 179 to 159 to back the amendment.

The amendment gives juries in capital murder cases, as well as cases of serious sexual abuse of children, the option to sentence people to serve hard labor while in prison. A hard labor sentence is not automatic under the proposal, as factors like age, health, and prior criminal records are taken into account.

But Harriott-Gathright warned that the only thing the amendment will do is hand an expensive legal bill to taxpayers as anyone sentenced to hard labor is certain to bring a lawsuit.

“It mandates labor camps for life. It punishes people who are medically unable to perform, and it authorizes long term isolation as an alternative punishment. That is a recipe for lawsuits, court challenges, and years of uncertainty, not justice or closure. Litigation is not hypothetically here. It is inevitable, and it is costly,” Harriott-Gathright said.

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.